The annual KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2008 in the heart of Europe, Belgium. The event is the most important conference for the contributors of the KDE project and will be held from Saturday August 9th to Saturday 16th at the De Nayer Institute, an associated campus of the University of Leuven. There are three sub-events: a contributors conference, the KDE e.V. annual general assembly and a week long hacking session. Akademy offers a great opportunity to the community to discuss all issues face-to-face. We also look forward to the chance to mingle with all KDE enthusiasts who want to drop by.

The conference will be organised by a local team assembled by Bart Cerneels and Wendy Van Craen, whose proposal to host Akademy at Sint-Katelijne-Waver's De Nayer Institute was chosen by the KDE e.V. membership. Sint-Katelijne-Waver is located near the city of Mechelen, and is close to both Brussels and Antwerp.

The Institute is itself a user of KDE. Patrick Pelgrims, coordinator of the Bachelor in Electronics/ICT curriculum said "We will be happy to receive the KDE community at our campus. They are the creators of the amazing software platform we use to educate many young people in the world of Electronics, Computer Engineering and Embedded Linux."

KDE e.V. would like to thank those who submitted the other proposals for hosting Akademy 2008 and we hope they will have a chance to host another KDE meeting soon.

The preliminary schedule for Akademy 2008 is as follows:

Days
Activity

Friday 8 August 2008

Arrivals

Saturday 9

KDE Contributors Conference

Sunday 10
Monday 11

KDE e.V. General Assembly

Coding Marathon

Tuesday 12

BoF Sessions, Tutorials, Workshops

Wednesday 13

Thursday 14

Friday 15

Saturday 16

You will be pleased to know that this year we have corrected the capitalisation of the name "Akademy".

A formal call for papers will be put up in due time, but you may wish to start thinking of talk subjects to write up for the contributors conference part of Akademy. For the hacking and BoF sessions, try to figure out who you need some quality face-to-face time with and convince them to come too!

We are looking out for people to help with organising Akademy, if you live in the local area or if you have good business relations and conference hosting skills please do get in touch with akademy-team@kde.org.

I am sorry, please no overpriced Belgium beer. Kriek, Oval,... sorry, no. Nothing for a beer gourmet. Leuven - Louvaine, the problem is that there are actually two universities or cities... Don't forget to make an appointment with your MEPs for next year Akademy, Brussels is close.

if you look around , you'll find REAL "kriek" , and not the
commercial stuff (BV). At least, we have a choice
choosing our beer's and software (love kde & geuze),
you just need to look a little bit further.

I'm surprised you're so sure. That said, I hope you're right. It does seem ridiculous how the Walone and Flemmish politicians can't get a long. But then Belgium is the home of Surréalisme. [ A Brit living in Brussels.]

Let's not get silly, the borders will all remain open if something happens as the language borders have already been set in law and in practice. There may come a small riot in Brussel because of youthfull heat (located in flanders but now mostly Frenchspeaking as many shopowners refused to speak Dutch, but people working there live beyond city borders in suburbs both in French and Dutch speaking Belgium) however with so many open borders nearby people feel very European and the splitstate government is of no consequence other then itself being the umbrella or the EU being the umbrella for moving some infrastructure money around.

Sure i'd prefered Brussels too but just cuz i'm living there :).
Anyway, Belgium or Belgium/2, i don't care, if it's resolved, great! if it splits, that's the way but we will finally look elsewhere and move on.

cheers and welcome.

BTW: Beers and Fries are really better in Brussels or near the coast then, in Mechelen you'll be there just for the conference. :)

You will be pleased to know that this year we have corrected the capitalisation of the name "Akademy".

no, i'm not pleased.

congratulations, you're just about to destroy a well established brandname, and start to drown it amongst the other "akademy"s that are out on the internet. and you are inviting now even more comments about the wrong spelling.

so why didn't you also correct the _*spelling*_ of the name?? after all, my english dictionary tells me it should be "academy" (maybe "Academy" if used as a title).

the 'aKademy' spelling has a "branding" effect. "Akademy" takes that away.

it's a stupid decision. for once, KDE will loose all the easy to recognize search results in Google and elsewhere (where the weird capitalization makes the result to become recognizable amongst the irrelevant ones). second, it proofs KDE can't be and behave consistent over time. third,... oh, well, i better stop ranting....

after all, the most important thing is the belgian organizers get their work done. if they get a great and big aKademy 2008 going, it will be quickly forgiven that they do not know how to give their event an easy to recognize branding. :-)

The KDE eV mailing list is not public. The KDE eV is there to handle organizational and "business" matters, well, about anything which needs a legal entity. It doesn't have much power apart from that, which is a good thing I think. Many members of the core KDE community are members of the eV.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eingetragener_Verein for an explanation of the eV acronym.

- Belgian beer is not overpriced. And you are in luck, Leuven is a student hangout and there are lots of places where beer (even specialty beer like Trappist) is pretty cheap; at least it was last time I was there. Typical student city so always something to do (besided hacking :p)

- Do not accidentally take the train to Louvain-La-Neuve... happens to the best *cough*

- True, the girls are delicious, but they're all MINE... eh, nevermind that :s

- Since it's university, you should have a pretty fast network connection. ;)

- Don't forget to bring/buy an umbrella (yes, even though it is summer... sometimes we get unlucky)

Thanks for the tips on Leuven as student city and the trains to Louvain-La-Neuve, but...

The Akademy is not taking place in Leuven at all, it's taking place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver (near Mechelen), in the De Nayer Institute. That's clearly stated in the second paragraph. So we better all take a train to Mechelen.

I do understand the confusion though, as the first paragraph refers to this institute as "an associated campus of the University of Leuven".